Researching your target audience is an important step before launching any affiliate marketing campaigns. When trying to find new audiences and looking for fresh ideas, we often have to turn to analyzing competitors’ activity. Let’s look at methods and tools to help you target your competitors’ audiences on FB.
Business Suite analytics
You may have previously used the Business Suite tool for analytics. However, not everyone knows that it is also useful for competitor analysis. In it, you can look at and compare the effectiveness of your page with similarly themed profiles. The functionality is similar to the Pages to Watch tool, but there is a significant difference. Business Suite itself will select and offer you possible competitor pages for comparison.
To do this, you need to open the page statistics in Business Suite and then click the Compare tab. In the list that opens, you can navigate to the pages of the intended competitors and perform additional analysis.
Another useful tab in this tool is Audience. In the filter, you can set basic data like location, gender, and age. The tool will show you a potential target, but that’s not all. By scrolling a little lower, you’ll see information about audience interests based on similar competitors’ campaigns (usually this one will be the “giants,” but the tips will help you better target even for smaller budgets).
Subscribe to each page. When you leave your like, the social network will offer you another list of similar pages. Look through them all and choose who else you should follow in your search for a similar target audience.
Note the comments below the posts. The Top Fans and Anniversary Follower icons indicate a particularly active audience. By the way, in the profiles of such fans you can also find interests and reposts of pages that may cover the CA.
Analyze comments and likes under content on open popular pages that are suitable for promoting your offer. Create a list of relevant topics for promotional content, and select pages to create custom Facebook audiences.
Paid advertising analysis
If you are subscribed to a large number of pages with potential CA, you can also enter the targeting of your competitors’ paid ads. Once you see a paid ad in your feed, interact with it. Click “Why am I seeing this ad?” (this item opens when you click on the three dots in the top corner on the right). Evaluate and highlight the mentioned parameters that you can use in your RCs.
Also use Facebook Audience Manager to keep a current list of potential interests and estimate the size of the audience you can target.
Meta Ad Library
Meta has a great Ad Library tool which you can use to see your competitors’ ads.
Using the built-in filter you can specify the parameters you want like platform, date, device type, and enter a keyword. In the list that opens, you can explore ad creatives with videos, photos, texts, and explore landing pages in ads in more detail. To do this, click on “View ad details.” This often lists options for testing creatives that are useful to take note of.
When you click on “Additional Resources from this ad,” an ad link will be available to you. Also, if you’re lucky, you’ll find the types of ad audience segments of your competitors.
How to target your competitors’ audiences
So, you’ve done a manual detailed analysis of your competitors and their audiences. Now it’s time to set up and run paid ads for your chosen target audience. Follow the instructions below.
- Go to the ad set level of your Facebook ad campaign and scroll down to the “Detailed Targeting” section.
- Click “Edit” and enter a competitor in the search bar.
- Create ad groups for tests and narrow down your targeting.
- Be sure to uncheck Advantage Detailed Targeting.
You can also choose Influencers, whose audience is suitable for your offerer.
To set up broader targeting, you can use the “Browse” feature and add entire categories of interests. But if you want to build a more specific audience, it’s helpful to look for specific interests. To get more niche interests, segment them into groups. It’s helpful to use Facebook Ads’ built-in A/B testing feature to compare ad sets against each other.
Don’t forget the retargeting tool
You can target people who have interacted with your publications and ads over a period of time. We recommend setting up retargeting for recent video viewers - a great way to identify interested leads and steer them toward conversions.
Set up targeting by lists and similar audiences
Have you done a good analysis of your competitors’ audiences? Then you may already have a detailed, detailed list of your potential audience. Use it to set up your paid advertising.
We also recommend that you don’t neglect targeting similar audiences. Remember that detailed targeting of Facebook Ads usually yields the best results when you use pixels and product catalogs as sources.
When targeting similar audiences, start with a small percentage (1-2%) of similarity to test.
To summarize
Facebook’s simple built-in tools and the resource of your time allow you to perform a fairly detailed analysis of your audience and competitors’ ads on FB. Conduct analytics and tests on a regular basis to always optimize your ROI performance and get even more profits.